Letters to David
Irving on this Website

David
Lappacomments from
Australia on the death of the "Father of the Hydrogen
Bomb"

Edward
Teller and Bald Egos: Dead at 95: The Good die
Young

"I always look upon him as a passionate
patriotic citizen of the country with a Hungarian
accent," Sewell said. "Boy, he (Teller) was American
through and through. He certainly wanted to see the
American ideals passed on as much as possible."

YOU would be astounded to read the transcripts of the
Non-Proliferation hearings in the US senate in the 1950s. If
you never thought US senators grovel, you must read their
exchanges with Edward Teller.

I worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab for twenty years. I
sometimes rode the elevator with Teller. I attended his
talks. I rode up a lift with him about an hour after Arafat
shook Rabin's reluctant hand on the White House lawn, almost
exactly 10 years ago. I nearly bit my tongue off, refraining
from asking him what he thought about it. He didn't look
happy that day.

A close friend claims Teller had expressed a desire to be
buried in Israel. Funny, for a man described by wire reports
as being "of Jewish origin", i.e., not Jewish, and a great
patriot. No word of that in any of the reports of his
exuberant Americanism. I guess, as always, the key question
is "patriot of which country?"

Presumably, Teller is a citizen of Israel; but, there's
no way he could have kept his ultra-high security clearance
with dual citizenship. Finessed, I suppose, like so many
other dual loyalty cases in the US. Teller has family in
Israel, and I suspect he had more than a little to do with
Israel's successful and clandestine nuclear weapons
program.

Teller was reputedly ultra-brilliant, though he never
impressed me so. I found him to be typically naïve;
unwilling to accept that other, less technical people, were
entitled to their skepticism of his claims. His attitude
(borne by so many in my field) is what killed nuclear power
in the US. I also found him sometimes exhibiting tunnel
vision; as when I heard him decrying the ban on DDT because
of all the deaths mosquitoes would cause. Apparently, he had
not conception that other pesticides or methods could be
used against mossies. I doubt he worried much over bald
eagles. Bald egos, certainly.

AS for his "Star Wars" role, the best story about him from
my days at "the Lab" date from when Teller's outlandish
claim -- that the entire US could be defended by a single,
desk-sized orbiting weapons system -- was held up to
ridicule. It got around that a new unit had been devised; a
unit of optimism, called the teller. The problem was,
like the farad, one teller was so huge that ordinary
events required only nanotellers or picotellers.

Teller hand-picked most of the Lab's early key
scientists. Then he left the seat of power to work ex
officio. His legacy remains in a place where every sort of
iconoclasm is abetted, except disdain for Israel. That will
get you fired. I saw it happen to many good employees.

Perhaps most intriguing is the manner in which Teller
gained so much control at Livermore. He was junior to the
much more powerful (and superior physicist) Ernest
Lawrence, after whom not one, but two US national
laboratories are named. (One at Berkeley, the other at
Livermore.)

Lawrence died young and, in my view, in mysterious
circumstances just after a trip to Europe. I believe it
possible he was assassinated; paving the way for Teller to
take over and shape the Livermore Lab.

Lawrence is claimed to have stolen the idea for his Nobel
prize-winning invention, the cyclotron, from -- whom else?
-- Jewish physicist Leo Szilard. The claim seems ludicrous,
and the US government certainly enshrined Lawrence's memory
well. But, we can expect, in time, Lawrence to succumb to
disrepute, while Szilard's legacy is growing, day by long,
long day.

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David Irving
comments:

AS I have related elsewhere on this
website ("Heisenberg
was right!"), I had the
distinction of interviewing Edward Teller for the
Munich edition of Penthouse magazine late in 1980. My
friend Rolf Hochhuth set up that little mission for
me. It was a hilarious interview, not without its moments of
black humour.

A few years later I spoke about the
interview during one of my speeches to the DVU in Passau. My
diary for August 9, 1985 reminds me: "The speech went down
well, particularly the references to [Werner]
Heisenberg and Edward Teller, and how Heisenberg had
described the scientists who had left Germany as the
Abschaum, perhaps a slight exaggeration (he called
them 'second class'), but the applause was
deafening."

One
day I will publish the tape transcript of my Teller
interview, if I can retrieve it from my files, which the
Government trustee seized in May 2002. It was necessarily
conducted in German. The version subsequently published by
Penthouse was, ahem, different.

Nearly twenty years later, I saw
the old man again. My diary for October 25, 1999 -- I was
visiting Stanford University to research in their archives
-- recalls:

Bumped into Edward Teller
outside the reading room; I thought it was him, remarked
to Joe that he looked like Edward Teller, and Joe said:
That was the name on his tag. I hurried back, but the
professor had gone. He was father of the hydrogen bomb, I
explained to Joe, who had never heard the name, I
interviewed T. here, at this building fifteen years or so
ago for Penthouse.

Iwrote
to one studentwho inquired about
the atomic bomb in 1999 ("Did Heisenberg want to build The
Bomb?")

If you really want to
shine in your class, write to Edward Teller, the "father
of the Hydrogen Bomb", at Stanford and ask him the same
question: he knew Heisenberg really well. I know that
Teller is still there because when I was at Stanford a
couple of weeks ago, researching in their manuscript
archives, I bumped into him: a bit more bent, a bit
grumpier, but still the same old gentleman I once
interviewed -- for Penthouse!